About Daniel Joseph Martinez

Using text, image, sculpture, video, and site-specific street performance, provocateur Daniel Joseph Martinez investigates challenging issues about America’s social architecture, democracy, capitalism, and the relationship between personal and collective identity. “I’ve always embraced a means to open debates, as part of a method to allow art to become an active agent of the possibility that ideas can infect our daily lives,” Martinez explains. “This usually leads to some form of controversy in the work.” For the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Martinez created new text for the museum’s admission badges that read “I Can’t Ever Imagine Wanting to Be White.” At the 2008 Biennial, he presented Divine Violence (2007), which consisted of 125 panels, each painted with the name of an organization that used violence to effect political change.